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Six Movements: Paintings by John Mendelsohn:



Opening Reception
November 19, 7-9pm

with performance at 8:30pm by Piano Trio
Longleash

Scholes Street Studio is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by John Mendelsohn from Six Movements, a series made from 2004-2006. This is the first exhibition of the series in New York.

The titles of the paintings, Shift, Zigzag, Phase, Crisscross, Fall, and Meeting, embody the specific kinds of visual movement explored in the series. Each movement is created by repeated forms that keep changing as they are reiterated. The artist has written that they recall “the appearance of one thing after another, like waves or mistakes, thoughts or breaths.”

In the exhibition are eleven paintings, representing the range of the entire series of 39 works. Each movement’s shifting field is minimal in description, but maximal in effect. The paintings are full of visual energy, arising from forms rendered in thin layers of vivid color, that collectively create optically active fields. Each of the six groups is essentially a set of variations, a way to experience in depth a specific kind of movement expressed in a chord of colors, whose graphic clarity paradoxically gives way to an almost musical complexity. Musical as well is the sense of abstract structure that is realized in terms of feeling, rather than just conceptually. Each movement of the paintings has its own emotional valence and quality of light, and its own set of allusions that may suggest themselves to the viewer.

Shift is a patchwork of dark and light lines that are constantly mismatched, creating high-energy spines where the strokes collide and shift. The paintings are continually pitching like a choppy sea, thrusting up peaks, and forming dark troughs between the waves.

Zigzag is a series of powerful bands that shiver, move diagonally, merge, and disappear. Overall the effect is optical, manic, ecstatic. There is sense of endless re-creation and mobility, suggesting an image that is just about to form.

Phase is a series of elongated diamonds, stacked on top of each other, and moving in four bending columns. The diamonds in a soft red glow against a contrasting set of ochre diamonds, touched by pink and green. The effect is inexorable, like the inevitability of the light at dawn.

Crisscrossmoves with a kind of close-order switchback, swaying as it rises. A nocturnal light alternates with green-black bands that x their way upward, creating phantom columns of darkness as they go.

Fall is a cascade of lines that at their upper reaches abruptly change planes, gathering tightly and swelling outward as they descend. While it may suggest nature, there is equally a nothing-up-my-sleeve sense of illusion, in the spirit of the carnival.

Meeting is a movement of interlocking v-forms that incrementally grow smaller in amplitude as they rise. They describe the meeting of two fields, distinguished by their concentration of colors common to both, and animated by a dappled luminosity, like light on a river.

John Mendelsohn has shown his paintings in solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn; 57 W. 57 Arts, New York; Kook Projects, New York; Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York; Michael Walls Gallery, New York; Hal Bromm Gallery, New York; Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark; Fairfield University; University of Rhode Island; and Milliken University. Group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, Nordiska Kompanient, Stockholm, Sweden; P.S.1 The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York; Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; Hallwalls, Buffalo; and Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, MA.

Mendelsohn’s exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, The Huffington Post, The New Criterion, Arts Magazine, Artnet, and d’Art International Magazine. He received a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from Rutgers University, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Tree of Life Foundation. www.johnmendelsohn123.com








The exhibitions can be seen during concert hours or by appointment.
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